“But when it is too complex for a student to complete even with parent support, it raises the question as to why it was set as a homework task in the first place”
In other words it is not homework that is the problem, it is homework that was set at the wrong level.
I thank God for my elementary school teachers who recognized that I was bored with the same repetitive lessons at the beginning of each school year. I was allowed to complete the assigned work, and then work independently on other material, in both math and reading. That way, they could still work the slower pace for the students who needed help, and I was still learning new material. Oh, and this was in classes of 40 kids with one teacher, no aides.
Back when I was in school I was reduced to tears because of my long division homework. The method made no sense. There was no logic. It was glorified guessing. And they would not tell me what I should do with the numbers that were left over. We would "get to that later".
My dad was home and sat down with me and in the course of one evening taught me how to divide. It was simple, it was clear, no guessing and what was left over was called the remainder. The next day I went in and flew through the worksheet and got a zero because I had the right answers but had not used the convoluted guessing method.
Dad went down and had a word with the teacher. Then he had a word with the principle. Then he took me out of that school.
The goal for decades in public education has been to keep kids from learning.
Mess them up at the basic level and you have ruined their best chance of rising up the social ladder.
As a former math teacher, I used methods that I understood and could explain, but I did not expect t parents to know how I presented material. The parents main job was to ensure that the student did the homework, and if they could not finish (or understand) then they could bring questions back to me. I suppose the parents could estimate the length of time that their kid should spend on stuff that they did not understand.
I knew teachers that expected the student to “get” the homework assignment and read the text to figure out how to do the problems. I would not do this. I tried to allow time to begin a homework assignment while in class so that I could “coach” the kids as they got started. BTW, I taught at the high school level.
I did have a student who came to me for help with long division. For him I wrote a program that would allow guessing at the multiple of a divisor that would be subtracted from a number being divided. If the student got a multiple correct, the program would subtract the multiple, give the number of times the divisor was used, and also reduce the number being divided. If the student entered a number that was not a multiple, the computer asked him to try again. (This is not the way long division is done, but this student understood how division worked with this continuous subtraction method and even cut other classes to come in and run the program on the only computer we had in the school. I was happy to see him “like” this process and I never knew any other reason to use this method in a normal class but it was fun to interest one student in math using the school computer, This sounds a little like the math concept discussed on this thread.
Or the math teacher was a drunk and didn’t know how to work the problems, either. This was the problem some 15 years ago with kiddo and the kids had to teach themselves.
Except that that isnt true either. Not even vaguely.
My kids come home with math that is quite easy, its the bizarre methods that they are supposed to use that is not explained anywhere.
They dont have books, there is not handout, there is no website.